


Boggart

by Mithen



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Kayfabe Compliant, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-14 00:59:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11772165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: How Braun Strowman met the Wyatt Family, came to the WWE, and eventually became friends with a boggart.





	Boggart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sanidine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanidine/gifts).



Braun comes across the compound on a wet, drizzly night. He isn’t lost--he never gets lost--but he’s sure it was never there before, this cluster of cabins in this swampy land. He stands in the chilly dark for a moment, staring at the warm orange light spilling from the windows.

He hears a rustle in the reeds and looks over to see the boggart.

It’s a weedy creature, like most boggarts, hunched and shriveled, with long fingers like twigs. Its hair falls in damp ringlets around its face and its eyes glow with a faint inner light, like the eerie radiance that plays across the marshes sometimes. It meets Braun’s eyes and a smile splits its wizened face, revealing far too many teeth. It points to the compound, still smiling, and fades into the swamp once more, leaving not a ripple behind.

After a moment, Braun shrugs and walks into the compound to knock on the door.

It opens and they let him in.

* * *

Not all the way in, as it turns out. There’s a reserve he never breaks through--and since he has no desire to, it works out well that way. He splits wood and traps game for them, though Rowan prefers to do the actual skinning. Braun can hear him humming happily to himself as he washes the blood off his hands later, slowing the water to a trickle so he can enjoy the loops and whorls of scarlet against the chipped white porcelain. Harper cooks and cleans, his eyes always following Wyatt like shards of metal pulled to a lodestone. And Wyatt tells stories late at night, the kind of stories Braun likes, full of floods and screams and the feeble strugglings of small things with triphammer heartbeats that slow within your grip.

Their voices are always gentle and low, but Braun can feel the power and the violence underneath, and he approves.

He sees the boggart from time to time, its pale eyes like lamps as it slips around the buildings in the shadows. It helps with the chores sometimes: Braun will find wood neatly stacked after he turns his back, or the pine needles cleared from the paths. Once there’s a freak snow flurry and he sees it dancing between the flakes, reaching up with long fingers as if to snatch them from the air.

Braun goes to town for the Family, to sell the wine that Rowan makes and buy some small items: nails and twine and black beeswax candles. He wonders if Wyatt trusts him not to run with the money, or if he cares so little about Braun that he wouldn’t miss him if he went. On a whim one January day he goes into a tattoo parlor and points at a symbol on the wall: a scarlet serpent twined within a diamond shape. 

“Into superheroes, huh?” asks the man as the needle dips and stabs.

Braun isn’t sure what he means, so he just grunts.

The serpent is coiled on his shoulder when he goes back to the compound. Harper eyes it uneasily, but says nothing.

* * *

In the summer Braun finds a broad leaf on the threshold piled high with ripe raspberries. “Thank you,” he calls into the swamp, and brings it inside.

“It would help you with the chores inside too, if you’d invite it in,” he says to Wyatt as they eat the berries.

Wyatt’s lips are stained crimson. “What do you mean?” he says with a smile that’s half-taunting and half-warning.

Boggarts can be dangerous, Braun knows this. Hobgoblins and sprites are largely amoral, but a boggart, treated improperly, can turn malign, can lure you into the swamps from where you’ll never be found. _Never give a boggart a name,_ his grandma used to say. He wonders why the boggart stays around the compound, what the connection is, but he shrugs and lets Wyatt change the topic.

* * *

And then they’re gone.

All three of the Family simply vanish one day, leaving everything tidied and neat. Braun has the compound to himself. He continues much the same way as before, though he had gotten used to their low voices and the mingled scent of blood and incense that crept up from the basement some days.

The boggart is gone too, he realizes eventually. The chores are his to do alone. He wonders absently if it followed them, if they know it went with them. 

It takes a couple of years, but eventually his curiosity gets the better of him and he goes off in search of them.

* * *

Someone has been foolish enough to give the boggart a name, he discovers to his amusement. It wasn’t Wyatt, who seems determined to pretend the boggart doesn’t exist. Rowan and Harper just tilt their heads and look at him when he brings it up, while Wyatt gets restless and twitchy and changes the subject.

Turns out Braun likes wrestling. He used to wrestle bears and crocodiles, so this is easy stuff. He likes smelling his victims’ panicked sweat, feeling their feeble struggles. He likes the sound of their gasping breaths. It’s more fun than chopping wood, and there’s a lot of free food.

The boggart gives him a sly smile now and then when their paths pass in the dark corridors. It’s taken on a more human form, but he recognizes the teeth and the bright eyes. One time, just as a lark, Braun takes a cup of raspberries from catering and hands them to the boggart. Its eyes light up with recognition. “Thank you,” it says, its voice lilting as if it’s still getting the hang of words. Braun knows the feeling; he just nods.

* * *

He gets traded away from the Family, put on Raw while they stay on Smackdown. At first he doesn’t care, and then he realizes he likes it even better. There’s more prey here, and he’s freer to do what he wants.

So he does what he wants.

When he makes Reigns bleed there’s a surge of delight in his gut: he wants it to never end. It feels like this was what he was born to do, make this man bleed and suffer. He’s still revelling in it when it comes crashing to an end with a shattered elbow. It’s hard to crush someone’s windpipe with just one hand, so he’s forced to call a hiatus until he heals.

He doesn’t know where else to go, so eventually he goes back to the compound.

* * *

It’s overgrown with weeds and wisteria now, the one burned building hunkered at the center like a rotted tooth or a broken heart. He never cared much about Abigail or visions, so he just settles in at one of the other buildings.

It’s boring, and the work is hard with one arm in a sling. He finds, to his surprise, that he misses the chatter of other wrestlers and the sound of the victory bell. He misses the hatred and the adulation of the crowds, the warm rush of satisfaction he felt when a child cringed away from him. He frowns up at the cobwebbed rafters, annoyed at this new sensation that he reluctantly accepts must be labeled _loneliness._

One night there’s a knock at the door and he opens it to find the boggart in its human skin on the doorstep.

“I just,” the boggart says in its eerie voice. “I was wondering if you were okay.”

“I’ve been better,” he says.

The boggart raises its pointed eyebrows, nodding in sympathy. “Me too,” it says. “I was a champion, did you know that? Nobody remembers that.”

“I know,” Braun says. And then, because why not: “Do you want to come in?”

Shock flickers on the boggart’s face, and then all its teeth show in a blinding, inhuman smile. “I… yes,” it says. “I’d like that.” It takes a hesitant step across the threshold, foot wavering in the air for a moment before coming down within. 

Braun turns away from the wonder on its face. “Sorry I couldn’t do it before,” he says curtly. “Wasn’t my home before.”

The boggart shakes its head in a quick dismissal of Braun’s apology. “This place is a _mess,_ ” it breathes, delighted. “Let me fix it up for you.”

Braun sits down in one of the old musty chairs with a sigh and listens to the boggart bustling around, the floorboards squeaking under its feet. It grabs a broom and starts to sweep the dust off the floor, singing under its breath in a cracked little voice about having Braun as right as rain soon, as right as rain in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, yes indeed, lilting the clichéd phrases with glee.

“We’ll go back together soon,” Braun says, half-asleep.

“Oh we will at that,” the boggart hums happily. “Yes we will! And oh, it’ll be _fun._ All you have to do…”

Braun chuckles drowsily and is asleep before the boggart can finish its catchphrase, but he does.

He does bo-lieve.


End file.
